State of the NationGuernsey · Living standards
Poverty, housing, food and loneliness.
Four of these five are measured by the States itself, in reports that are published and then rarely read together. The fifth, food-bank usage, is a genuine gap, and this page says so rather than filling it with numbers that do not belong in the same column.
- Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2022
- 18.9%Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2022
- The 60%-of-median threshold, 2022
- £22,318The 60%-of-median threshold, 2022
- Food insecure at some point in six months, 2023
- 13.9%Food insecure at some point in six months, 2023
- Without secure housing, 2023
- 1.9%Without secure housing, 2023
Measured annually since 2014
Relative poverty
The share of the population living below 60% of median equivalised income after housing costs, and the same share once those receiving supplementary benefit or income support are excluded.
Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2014 to 2022
Read the whole run, not the recent movement. 2019’s 16.5% is the lowest reading in the series, so quoting the 2022 figure as “up from 16.5%” is cherry-picking. That comparison is arithmetically true, a rise of 2.4 points, and it still misleads, because it measures from the best year Guernsey has recorded rather than from anywhere typical. Set against 2014, where the series begins, 2022’s 18.9% is 3.4 points lower, not higher.
The second line is the same measure with recipients of supplementary benefit or income support removed. It sits consistently below the headline, and the distance between the two lines is what the benefit system is doing. In 2022 the 60%-of-median threshold was £22,318.
States of Guernsey, Guernsey Indicators of Poverty Report. Measured after housing costs, social security and tax, and equivalised for household size. This is designated an annual publication and the States’ own 2026 publication calendar names the next edition, the Annual Indicators of Poverty Report 2024. That edition currently sits on the calendar’s undated list, with no announced publication date, so the run stops at 2022 until it appears. Nine annual points, 2014 to 2022. The Jersey points are the same measure on the same definition — below 60% of median equivalised income, after housing costs — from the States of Jersey Income Distribution Survey, which runs roughly five-yearly rather than annually. They are plotted as discrete waves, each at its first calendar year, and are deliberately not joined into a line: Jersey publishes no reading for the years in between, and the wave before this window (2009/10, 21%) falls outside it. Income Distribution Survey; Homelessness in Jersey, quarterly report; Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey.
Cost of living
Incomes, housing costs & the price of food
What an island income actually buys, after housing and at the till. Real median household income fell 10% between 2017 and 2022 while housing took a rising share of what was left.
-10%
Real change in median household income, 2017 to 2022. In cash terms it rose 5.3%, to £55,116.
30.5%
Share of net disposable income going on housing in 2022, up from 24.3% in 2018. Guernsey is the highest bar on the report’s own OECD comparison.
£37,197
Median household income in 2022 after tax, social security and housing costs, equivalised. Lowest quintile £10,284, highest £106,215.
Housing costs as a share of gross income, by tenure
- Affordable renters and partial owners33%
- Lone parents33%
- Private market renters26%(was 22%)
- Owner-occupiers with a mortgage20%
Household Expenditure Survey 2023–24. Three waves exist, so this is a five-yearly step, not a trend.
Annual price change by RPI group, June 2026
- Fuel and light+19%
- Catering (eating out)+6.3%
- All items+4.3%
- Food (shop-bought)+3.2%
Food is its own published RPI group, index 180.5 on a December 2004 = 100 base, meaning shop-bought food has risen 80.5% in 21 years. Next release 27 October 2026.
Savings held, 2023–24
- No savings at all29%
- Less than one month’s income12%
- One to six months24%
- More than six months34%
41% hold less than one month’s income. 11% of households make ends meet with difficulty, rising to 41% among affordable-market renters and partial owners. These questions were new in this wave, so there is no comparator.
Coping with an unexpected expense, 2023
- Could not afford £1005.1%
- Could afford £100, but not easily17.8%
- Could not afford £1,00018.8%
- Could afford £1,000 only with difficulty30.3%
Wellbeing Survey 2023. Guernsey publishes no national-accounts household savings rate at any cadence, so these two panels are the whole picture.
The house price to earnings ratio is frozen. It reads 14.1× at Q3 2024, having peaked at 16× in Q1 2023, and the quarterly bulletin states the table “has not been updated since the third quarter of 2024, since more recent earnings data is not yet available”. The blockage is the suspended earnings bulletin, not the property data, which is current. The ratio that does still move is price to annual rent, at 23.3× in Q2 2026.
States of Guernsey Data & Analysis. Household Income Estimates Report 2022 (incorporating the August 2025 corrigendum, which corrected precisely these real-terms change figures); Household Expenditure Survey 2023–24; Quarterly Inflation Bulletin, June 2026; Residential Property Prices Bulletin; Guernsey & Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023. The income figures are experimental: 42% of person-level income was machine-learning imputed, and only two comparable points exist. The Annual Household Income Report has no announced next edition.
A measure that does exist
Housing insecurity
Guernsey is often said to have no homelessness statistic. It has one. The States built an official measure of the population without secure housing in response to the Guernsey Community Foundation's 2022 homelessness report, and has published it back to 2016.
Population without secure housing, 2016 to 2023
From 1.2% in 2016 to 1.9% in 2023. The shaded band marks 2020, when visitor accommodation was pressed into housing use during the pandemic. That changed what the measure counts, so the points either side of the band are not strictly like-for-like and the eight years should not be read as one uninterrupted run.
Social rented and partial ownership waiting list, households at 31 December
- 2019
- 264
- 2020
- 300
- 2023
- 354
- 2024
- 384
264 households in 2019, 384 in 2024. New applicants in a single year rose from 115 in 2019 to 263 in 2024, 148 more people joining the queue in a year than five years earlier. Only post-merger readings are shown. A methodology change in October 2018 combined the States and Guernsey Housing Association lists, so anything earlier is not like-for-like.
2,662 units
Affordable housing stock in 2025, 9.6% of all housing on the island. No net additional affordable units were created during 2025, and the stock has been flat since 2022, so the queue above grew against a stock that did not.
Secure housing: States of Guernsey. The measure exists because the Guernsey Community Foundation’s 2022 homelessness report argued the island could not manage what it did not count, and it is the answer to that. Waiting list: social rented and partial ownership applicants recorded at 31 December each year, post-2018-merger readings only.
New in the 2023 survey wave
Food insecurity
The Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023 carried the standard Food Foundation three-item instrument for the first time, which makes the island's figure internationally comparable but leaves it with no history of its own.
13.9%
Experienced food insecurity at some point in the previous six months, 2023.
5.7%
In the previous month alone. Roughly two in five of the six-month group, so this is a recurring condition for a substantial share of them rather than a single bad week.
The three items, previous six months, 2023
- Ate smaller meals or skipped meals12.6%
- Were hungry but did not eat8.9%
- Did not eat for a whole day3.5%
The items are nested by severity, from eating less to not eating at all for a day. Bars are scaled to the largest of the three, not to 100%.
Who reports it, 2023
- Aged 25–3427.9%
- Households with children23.0%
- In affordable housing19.0%
- In private rental17.1%
- Households without children10.9%
- Aged 75+2.9%
- Owner-occupiers2.2%
The gradient runs by age, by tenure and by whether there are children in the household. Owner-occupiers and the over-75s sit at the bottom of every cut of this measure.
One item has a genuine 2018 comparator, and it more than doubled. The share saying they had skipped meals went from 5.5% in 2018 to 12.4% in 2023, a rise of 6.9 points. That single line is the only part of this section with a before and an after.
Everything else here is a first reading. 2023 is the first wave to carry the module, so there is no back-series and nothing to compare against. The Wellbeing Survey runs on a roughly five-yearly cycle, which means the earliest possible second data point for the full instrument arrives around 2030. Any claim that food insecurity in Guernsey is rising or falling, made before then, is not resting on this measure.
Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023, section 5.4. The three-item instrument is the Food Foundation’s, which is what makes the headline internationally comparable. The survey report describes the 2023 wave as allowing food insecurity to be considered for the first time.
The one genuine gap
Food-bank usage
There is no chart here, and that is the finding. No official statistic exists, the operating charity publishes no series of its own, and the figures that do circulate arrive through a funder's annual review or the local press in units that cannot be put on the same axis.
714
households supported
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
68
families a week, on average
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
~3,500
visits to the centre
2025
Lloyds Bank Foundation CI annual review
3,190
requests for help, against 2,474 in 2022
2023
Guernsey Welfare Service, via local press
These four figures must not be chained into a series. They are counted in four incompatible units. Households supported, families a week, visits to the centre and requests for help each answer a different question. A weekly average and an annual household count cannot be plotted on the same axis, and the weekly averages that circulate locally rest on contested base years drawn from different sources. Placing them end to end produces a trend line that no one measured.
Every one of them understates need by construction. The service caps users at one visit a month. Throughput is therefore bounded by the cap rather than by demand, so a flat or falling visit count is compatible with rising need, and cannot be read as evidence against it.
What would close the gap is a single published series on one basis, at a stated frequency, from either the charity or the States. Until that exists, these figures are usable individually, with their date and their source attached, and not otherwise.
Two comparable waves, 2018 and 2023
Loneliness
Measured on the De Jong Gierveld scale in the Wellbeing Survey. The instrument was not carried in 2013, so 2018 and 2023 are the only two waves that can be compared.
| Measure | 2018 | 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lonely often or all the timeSignificant | 18.6% | 16.9% | -1.7 pts |
| Scoring 5–6 on the 0–6 scale | 19.1% | 21.7% | +2.6 pts |
| Intensely emotionally lonely | 15.4% | 15.5% | +0.1 pts |
| Intensely socially lonely | 31.5% | 34.9% | +3.4 pts |
| Intensely socially lonely, aged 75+ | 16.9% | 27.5% | +10.6 pts |
The headline and the sub-scales point in opposite directions. The share reporting they are lonely often or all the time fell from 18.6% to 16.9%, and the report itself treats that fall as statistically significant. Reported on its own it reads as an improvement. Every other line in the table moved the other way. The share scoring 5 or 6 on the 0 to 6 scale rose, intense social loneliness rose, and among the over-75s intense social loneliness rose 10.6 points, from 16.9% to 27.5%.
Both things are true at once. Fewer people describe themselves as lonely, and more people score as intensely lonely on the instrument that does not ask them to self-describe. Quoting the headline without the sub-scales would be straightforwardly misleading, which is why both are carried here.
28.1%
Intensely emotionally lonely, aged 16 to 24, 2023.
5.0%
Intensely emotionally lonely, aged 75 and over, 2023.
The age gradient inverts depending on which kind of loneliness is being measured. Emotional loneliness, the absence of a close attachment, is concentrated among the youngest adults. Social loneliness, the absence of a wider network, is concentrated among the oldest. A policy response built for one of them will miss the other, and an average across both hides the fact that they are different problems in different households.
Guernsey and Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023, De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale. Two comparable waves only. The instrument was not carried in the 2013 survey, so there is no earlier point. “Significant” marks a change the report itself reports as statistically significant.
Sources for this page: Guernsey Indicators of Poverty Report; Guernsey & Alderney Wellbeing Survey 2023; Guernsey Household Expenditure Survey 2023–24; Guernsey Welfare Service. Each figure is dated by the period it measures. Where a measure has a methodology break or a single reading only, that is stated beside it rather than smoothed over.
Budget 2027
Taxes and duties for 2027
What the Policy & Resources Committee's 2027 Budget (published 6 October 2026) proposes for household finances.
Allowance £15,850
Up £650 in line with inflation. The threshold at which allowances begin to be withdrawn stays at £85,000, so its real value falls.
Bank interest exempt to £75
First rise since the £50 exemption was introduced in 2015. Modest, but the first uplift in twelve years.
Mortgage interest relief ending
The cap on eligible interest falls from £3,500 to £2,000 in 2027 and £1,000 in 2028, and the relief ends from 2029. See the Housing page for the policy context.
Charitable giving to £50,000
Per-person annual cap on tax-free donations rises from £10,000. The most a charity can gain from one donor goes from £2,500 to £12,500.
Pint duty: 65.4p → 55.7p
Duty on a pint of beer or cider rises from 61.3p to 65.4p. A new tap relief scheme cuts that to 55.7p for qualifying draught beer, cider and wine sold through the hospitality sector. Annual cost about £342k.
Vaping duty £2.20 per 10ml
Agreed in the 2026 Budget, in force from 2026-11-09 subject to the 2027 Budget debate. Tobacco duty rises 5% in real terms as part of the Combined Substance Use Strategy 2027–2032.
Caps on higher incomes rise
The cap on non-Guernsey source income and Guernsey bank interest rises from £160,000 to £171,000. The worldwide-income cap rises from £320,000 to £342,000. The Open Market tax cap for new arrivals steps up from £60,000 to £65,000 in 2027, then to £75,000 / £85,000 / £95,000 by 2030. All caps then rise with RPIX each year.
Pensions: the deficit inside the Social Security Funds
The Guernsey Insurance Fund, which pays contributory pensions, moves from a £15.9m deficit in the 2026 Forecast to a £22.9m deficit under the 2027 Budget: a widening of 44% in a single year. The Long-Term Care Insurance Fund surplus falls from £11.6m to £9.6m. Together the two funds carry Guernsey’s state pension and care promise, paid from current workers’ contributions.
The Budget report has social insurance benefits at £204.2m in 2025, £216.1m in the 2026 forecast and £230.8m in the 2027 budget. That is growth of 5.8% and then 6.8%, or 6.3% a year. Our projection assumes 3.8% a year from 2027 in the central case, taken from the 74% rise in pension spending to 2040 that the Bailiwick Express reported from the last actuarial review, and 5% in the high case. The Budget’s own figures sit above both.
If spending kept that pace, the Insurance Fund’s reserves would run out by 2039 with contribution rates held and by 2043 even with the planned rate steps and £19m a year of further income. Two years is a short run, so this is a sensitivity, not a forecast. The social security page shows the full model.
Between 2023 and 2025 the pension line rises 14.5%, from £154.2m to £176.6m. The number of pensions in payment rises 1.9%, from 18,807 to 19,155. Spending per pensioner therefore rises 12.4%. In these two years the rate is moving the bill and the headcount is not.
The double lock uprates pensions by the higher of RPIX or RPIX plus a third of the gap to median earnings growth. For 2026 that gave 4.2% where RPIX alone gave 3.7%, which adds about £0.9m to the 2026 pension line, and the gap compounds each year. Ageing is the larger long-run pressure, with a 74% rise projected to 2040. Until then the uprating rule decides how fast the bill grows.
These figures are the Social Security Funds operating position before investment returns. Appendix VI, p.143. The report does not publish opening or closing balances for the Guernsey Insurance Fund itself.